The Mouth That Roared (38 page)

The replacement Mets probably wished they had never signed up in the first place, or at least wished they had been picked up by another team. When they reported for spring training, I put them through the same regimens and routines as the regular players. That included four-hour workouts with lots of running.

Any major leaguer who wanted to cross the picket line was welcome to join us. That was their choice. I wouldn’t have called them scabs. They would have heard plenty of that from the union and its supporters, however.

Hundreds of former major leaguers and a handful of minor leaguers chose to defy the union by signing on as replacements.

Each replacement player got a $5,000 signing bonus and the chance to make up to $275,000 in salary. More importantly, I suppose, they got to chase a dream, even if that meant incurring the scorn of the real major leaguers whose objectives they were helping to undermine.

We used tryout camps and our scouting department to find about half of the 28 fill-in players who reported to Mets camp in Port St. Lucie. Quite a few got contracts based on word of mouth, without anybody in the organization actually having seen them play.

Even when the 1995 season was close to starting with replacement players, I maintained faith that common sense would prevent that from happening.

“I think, if I’m allowed to think, that after six months they’ve banged it out as hard as they’re going to and they’ve come at last to recognize the resolve of each other,” I told the
Daily News
. “Now quit the bullshit and let’s get after it…The players, the owners, Congress, they’re all getting antsy.”

Five bills aimed at ending the strike had been introduced on Capitol Hill. None of them passed.

The bullshit continued for a few more days. We went to Cleveland for the final exhibition game before the games started to count. A loss in the snow against the Indians dropped our spring training record to 7–17. The next day, we were scheduled to play the major league opener against the Marlins in Joe Robbie Stadium. But shortly after we left the field against the Indians, the owners and players union announced they had reached an accord. Our regular players started reporting the next day for an abbreviated spring training.

Baseball would pay a heavy price for canceling the 1994 World Series and coming to the brink of using replacement players for the 1995 regular season. It took the Mets and other teams years to achieve pre-strike attendance levels. I understand the reasoning of the fans who stayed away. Baseball had let everyone down. The whole ordeal confirmed that greed was badly damaging the game.

Team chemistry is a chicken-or-the-egg kind of deal. Does winning create chemistry? Or does chemistry help teams win? Either way, I’d been searching for the right mix of players on my ballclub since I took over the Mets.

The team that took the field for a belated, post-strike season opener on April 26, 1995, looked a lot different than the team I inherited from Jeff Torborg two years earlier. Todd Hundley, Bobby Bonilla, and Jeff Kent were the only players in the Opening Day lineups in 1993 and 1995. Bret Saberhagen was the only pitcher in the starting rotation at the beginning of 1993 who was still in the rotation when we broke camp in 1995. And only two of those players would still be on the team in August.

My goal of surrounding promising up-and-comers with hard-working veterans was impossible to realize without the help of the Mets front office. But as he went about overhauling the roster, general manager Joe McIlvaine only occasionally took my advice. I did manage to convince him to make an offer to free agent center fielder Brett Butler, who had helped teams in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles during his 14-year career. Brett’s desire to stay on the West Coast made him reluctant to come to New York. But Sabes, John Franco, and I lobbied him. It cost the Mets about $2 million to sign Brett to a one-year deal, but I was convinced his talent and leadership made it a worthwhile investment.

An important step was getting my younger players to buy into my program. It felt like that might be happening. After I criticized the team for its lackadaisical play at the start of the season, outfielder Ryan Thompson said, “I ain’t going to argue with the big guy. If he says we need to hustle more, we better do it.”

I’m not really sure why we didn’t win more games in 1995. For a while, I blamed our slow start on young players not getting to experience a full spring training. But a couple of months into the season, that started to sound like a weak excuse.

Our poor play prompted another round of housecleaning. It started with the release of relief pitcher Josias Manzanillo, whose ineffectiveness cost us several games early in the season. Bonilla groused that Manzanillo, who immediately got picked up by the Yankees, didn’t deserve to take the fall for the team.

Unbeknownst to me, Manzanillo may have sought an artificial advantage while with the Mets. His apparent steroid use earned him a mention in the Mitchell Report, a 2007 report commissioned by Major League Baseball about players’ use of performance-enhancing drugs.

*

By late July, we were 20 games under .500 and stuck in the National League East cellar.

McIlvaine’s next moves bypassed the margins of the team and hit right at its core. He traded Bonilla to the Orioles for Damon Buford and Alex Ochoa. A couple of days later, he dealt Saberhagen to the Rockies for Juan Acevedo and Arnold Gooch. Next to go was Brett Butler, who got traded back to the Dodgers for two minor leaguers.

McIlvaine and co-owners Fred Wilpon and Nelson Doubleday didn’t share their thought processes with me, but the logic behind the trades was pretty obvious. Between them, Bonilla, Sabes, and Butler earned almost as much money as the rest of the team they left behind. What’s the point of paying that kind of money to players if you’re still going to end up in last place?

In three short years, the Mets went from having one of the highest payrolls in baseball to one of the lowest.

Our hopes now rested with what the front office hoped was a younger and hungrier bunch. Based on their inexperience, I didn’t have a real feel for a lot of my players. If one of the replacement guys from spring training had snuck into the clubhouse and suited up, I might not have noticed.

The Mets needed to be dismantled, no question about it. It’s not hard to tear something down. But I questioned whether McIlvaine had a plan for building it back up.

I let it be known that I didn’t think a team could be successful without any veterans in the lineup or pitching rotation. “Managers and coaches can’t do it all,” I told
The New York Times
. “You have to have help in the clubhouse.”

But then something unexpected happened after the All-Star break: we played extremely well.

The kids showed they were hungry. Pitchers Jason Isringhausen and Bill Pulsipher and position players Carl Everett, Edgardo Alfonzo, and Rico Brogna, none older than 25, helped carry us to a 44–31 record after the All-Star break.

In the final week of the season, McIlvaine announced that my coaches and I would return for at least one more season.

Our strong finish raised expectations going forward. That put a lot of pressure on young pitchers who, in my mind, still weren’t ready for the major league grind. These guys had been pleasant surprises in 1995, but I didn’t think they were ready to carry the hopes of the organization on their shoulders. We needed to keep adding to the team.

The front office disagreed. And that led to my downfall.

*

McIlvaine publicly acknowledged that my background as a front office guy was an asset to the team.

Too bad he and Mets ownership didn’t take that a step further by valuing my input more.

Maybe the timing of my tenure with the Mets was the problem. The relationship between Wilpon and Doubleday had started to deteriorate. Wilpon began asserting himself as the point man for every Mets decision, while Doubleday slowly faded into the background.

Under adverse conditions, my staff and I had accomplished an awful lot. Now we wanted to take the next step. But Wilpon wouldn’t allow us to. Not only didn’t he add to the team, but he also allowed our public relations team to tout our three young starting pitchers, Isringhausen, Pulsipher, and Paul Wilson, as the next coming of Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, and Jerry Koosman. Behind “Generation K,” as the trio was called, fans were led to believe it was going to be 1969 all over again.

That’s amazing pressure to put on a trio of pitchers who were barely over the legal drinking age.

At least Isringhausen and Pulsipher paid their dues in the minors and showed initial signs of being successful major league pitchers. Both had been knocking around the team’s farm system since 1992. Pulsipher, a left-hander, posted four straight winning records in the minors before getting called up in 1995. Isringhausen, a 44
^th
-round draft pick out of Lewis & Clark Community College in Illinois, came out of nowhere to establish himself as one of the top young prospects in the game.

In 14 starts in 1995, Isringhausen went 9–2 with a 2.81 ERA. Pulsipher went 5–7 with a 3.98 ERA.

Wilson, the first overall pick in the 1994 amateur draft out of Florida State, wasn’t even a proven minor leaguer yet. Pegged immediately as a future star, poor Paul went out and lost all seven of his decisions his first year in the lower minor leagues. In 1995, he improved by winning 11 games between Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Norfolk. He had started to figure things out, the operative word being
started
. Who was the real Paul Wilson—the guy who couldn’t win a game in A-ball or the guy who showed promise in Binghamton and Norfolk?

In my opinion, Wilson needed at least another year in the minors to answer that question. And Isringhausen and Pulsipher needed time to grow into the roles the organization expected them to fill.

I tried to state my case to McIlvaine that we needed to acquire a pitcher, but I had a helluva time reaching him.

I liked Joe, but he was an absentee general manager at times. Whenever I called or dropped by his office, his secretary would invariably say, “Joe’s out of town, Dallas. Can he get back to you?” At first, I didn’t think much of it. As a former GM myself, I knew the job demanded a lot of travel. But it seemed odd that his secretary never gave me more information on his whereabouts. Eventually I started asking where Joe was exactly.

“He’s traveling,” his gal would say.

“Where is he traveling?”

“I’ll need to check on that. I just know he’s traveling.”

I ended up hearing through the grapevine that he might be spending a lot of time on non-baseball activities in Atlantic City.

Joe’s disappearing act obviously created communication problems between us. Back in my Phillies days, the manager and general manager had daily discussions about every facet of the team. Maybe Joe and Fred were having those conversations outside my presence, but I don’t think so. It’s a shame, really. If we had all met regularly to share ideas about the team, we could have helped ourselves a lot.

*

I’ll start with my positive memories of the 1996 season.

Todd Hundley, who never really distinguished himself offensively or defensively in his first six seasons with the Mets, had an unbelievable year. I credit bullpen coach Steve Swisher, himself a former major league backstop, for helping Todd revitalize his career. Swish would have Todd report two hours before scheduled workouts to run and talk pitching and catching.

Todd’s defense improved a lot, and at the plate, he was off the charts. He hit 41 home runs, the single-season record for a catcher at the time. His previous season-high had been 16 homers. I’d like to think Todd’s work ethic, rather than anything artificial, led to his breakout year. But the Mitchell Report quoted a former Mets clubhouse employee as saying he sold Todd steroids in 1996. I never knew Kirk Radomski, so I can’t say whether he was telling the truth or not.

All I can speak about is what I personally observed that season. A lot of the younger players on the team couldn’t wait to get out of the clubhouse after games, but Todd and outfielder Bernard Gilkey, whose 30 home runs and 117 RBIs in ’96 were also career highs, hung around as late into the night as I did. Sometimes I’d stop and have a beer with them and yak about the game. I viewed Todd and Bernard as old-school players who genuinely enjoyed being at the ballpark.

I also got tremendous contributions from leadoff hitter Lance Johnson, who batted .333, stole 50 bases, and led the majors in hits and triples.

The production from these veteran players compensated for Brogna, Everett, and Alfonzo coming back to earth in ’96. The young guys were still learning what playing every day in the major leagues was all about.

If only our pitching had been as unhittable as advertised.

*

Pulsipher didn’t have a chance to live up to the hype. He missed the entire 1996 season with an injury to his left pitching elbow and didn’t pitch again in the majors until 1998.

His absence put even more pressure on Isringhausen and Wilson, who hardly looked like stars in the making. After his impressive rookie year, Izzy stumbled badly. By mid-August, he was 5–13 with a 4.85 ERA.

At that point in the season, Wilson was 4–9 with a 6.47 ERA.